“If everything can be a national emergency or a threat to national security or a matter of foreign policy, then essentially all constitutional powers are ceded to the president,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford Law School. “And that can’t be intended by the constitutional design.”

“I think there is more skepticism about the government’s assertions, but it doesn’t mean that courts are uniformly willing to challenge the factual basis on which the government is justifying some of its more extreme measures,” Sinnar said.